Cracks in the Wall
by FieldOfPaperFlowers
Summary: Collection of "snippets," little not-even-fics that I scribble when I'm bored. Set in a non-uniform timeline, sometime in the future when Leo and Reyna are together. Pointless and plotless. Leyna.
1. Leg Cramps

_I hope you're not expecting genius here. Take the Leyna. Take it._

_Standard disclaimer, it's all Rick Riordan's._

Leo looked up in surprise from his seat on the couch as Reyna flopped down beside him and very pointedly dropped her right foot onto his stomach. "I ran farther than usual this morning," she said. "My calves have been cramping all day."

He eyed her leg, wary. He'd been tricked before. "And my responsibility for that is …?"

"Rub my leg, Hot Hands," she said with a sigh, having figured out weeks ago that his higher-than-normal body temperature made him a stellar masseur. She gestured to the upper end of her right calf: "Right here."

Leo had a healthy sense of self-preservation, but he also had a healthy sense of _Holy Hephaestus my girlfriend is gorgeous_, so he didn't argue it. She began to unravel her braid; he grinned sideways at her and took her lower leg in both hands, working at the tight muscle. She rolled her ankle and made an affirmative "hmm." Good, he was unlikely to be murdered tonight.

He worked his way down toward her ankle, but when the heel of his hand brushed her heel, she jerked away. "Not my foot," she warned him, her toes curling instinctively. It was hard to take her seriously, even though he'd found out about her ticklish spots the hard way. All the other demigods saw a serious, hardworking praetor; he saw a girl who shrieked and twisted backward whenever he squeezed her waist.

Obediently Leo moved his hands back up under her knee. He was suppressing a smile, though—he'd had an idea. He maintained his best innocent look as he skipped over her knee and curled his rough mechanic's fingers under the lowest part of her thigh.

Her braid half undone, Reyna looked up in surprise. "My hamstring is fine," she started, sounding almost a little uncertain, and that was when he pulled her toward him by the leg, knocking her from her pristine posture and half into him. In one quick motion she went from sitting upright to lying on her back, one leg stretched out across his lap and the other bent by his waist.

He leaned over her, careful not to catch her pooling hair when he set his hands by her shoulders. He was going to enjoy this rare moment of having the advantage, the upper hand. "Your running thing is hot," he said with a grin. "But really, if you wanted my hands on your legs, all you had to do was ask."

A smirk on her lips, she cocked her head and beckoned for him to come closer, so he lowered himself until barely an inch remained between them. His curls brushed against her forehead as he waited, and then:

"I did ask," she whispered, her breath hot against his ear.


	2. Lessons

_Set sometime in the future, after Leo and Reyna have actually gotten together._

Leo and Reyna crouched on the kitchen floor of her villa, Argentum lying in front of them in sleep mode, his control panel disconnected and in Leo's hand. Reyna kept one hand on the silver dog, the other on his gold brother, and both eyes on her favorite mechanic.

"You've got a pretty complex system here," he was saying, tapping one finger on its center. "Q3R-ii, fourth generation. Hard to find replacements. No wonder the Vulcan kids don't want you touching them."

"Thank you for trying to make me feel better," she said drily, giving him a small wry smile, "but I _know_ it's complex. What I _don't_ know is how to do anything with it. So maybe try moving on to that."

"Yes, ma'am, _mi reina_." He saluted, earning an eye roll, but he did at least move into less technical, more relevant territory. "So when they start doing the spitting-up-oil thing, you can put them in the kennel like normal—"

"Wow! Really?"

He gave her a mock dirty look for her wild sarcasm. "Students must raise their hands and be called on by Teacher if they have something to share with the class."

"Students, plural? Who else are you giving lessons to, Leo?" She raised her eyebrows, cocked her head, and eyed him, a small smirk playing at her lips as the possible meanings of _lessons_ registered visibly on his face. "I'm a little offended, to be honest. I thought I was your only student."

He sighed dramatically. "Nobody appreciates Doctor Professor Valdez's extensive knowledge base." He shrugged, but a grin betrayed him. "And I have all this extra time, so whenever people ask—"

"Well, in that case, I'm going to need to schedule some private tutoring sessions with the doctor professor," she decided, and the suggestive gleam in her eyes was enough to get him to set aside the control panel for a second and press his lips to hers, hot but not steaming. She couldn't help but respond, returning the pressure, slipping one hand along his jaw, smiling a little against him. Three months of dating, and he'd finally stopped asking if she liked kissing him.

But too soon she forced herself to pull away. "I still want you to show me how to do the control panel thing," she said.

Shaking his head a little like he had to remember where he was, he glanced down at the control panel and picked it back up. "Okay. I was saying . . . What was I saying?"

"Before the extended metaphor, you were telling me I could do what I've done for the last five years. I sincerely hope there was an 'or' coming after that."

"There was!" He summoned his focus—which wasn't much—and held up the panel. "_Sí, sí, sí. Vale—aquí. _Back on subject. So you can stick them in a kennel to minimize casualties, or, if you know how, you can put them to sleep—hibernation mode—the way I do when I'm going to do maintenance. And you can leave them asleep, maybe do a quick check."

She shifted closer, peering at the panel. "Okay, show me." She learned by doing, not listening.

Luckily, Leo seemed to be the same way. "Hang on." His fingers moved in a blur as he wired the control panel back into Argentum's neck. Quick, as to be expected after months of being her dogs' sole mechanic. When it was in place he did his best Vanna White impression, framing the mechanism with his hands. "This is what it should look like before and after."

"Got it," she said, even though she wanted to say _gee that's genius, it's not like I look at them every day of the week._ Leo was still working on the temperamental part of his insecurities, and she knew full well that if she offended him he might just refuse to show her what to do, and then she would be right back to square one since none of the Vulcan kids felt she knew enough to do any repairs herself. (Not that they dared to say it quite that bluntly, to her face, anyway.)

"Okay. Now here's the thing. You have to put your hands here—" He situated, his fingers around the edge of the panel, pressing in and down. "—and _keep them there_ while you unscrew the mechanized lock." He let go for a moment to dig through his tool belt pockets, pulling out several containers of breath mints before he got the tool he needed. She leaned in close enough to smell aftershave, and he began to unscrew the panel, slowly enough that she could see.

"Now here's the thing," he said again.

She cocked an eyebrow. "The other thing."

He wrinkled his nose at her. "Teacher doesn't appreciate your attitude. Anyway, the thing is, your first instinct is to just go in and yank this out, right? But you can't do that. Ever, ever. Bad things would happen, like the world would explode and pizza would cease to exist. You have to grip it tight around the corners, like this—" He demonstrated. "—and lift it up veeeeery slooooowly, just a quarter of an inch, so you can just start to see the wiring inside."

"Okay . . ." She craned her neck trying to look at it from the same angle as he was. The barest hints of blue and red wire were visible in the slit between the neck and the panel. "I see it. Now what?"

"Now you need one of these, and one of these." He pulled out unfamiliar tools from different pockets on his belt. One looked pokey, the other screwy, and Reyna was embarrassed to realize that was all she knew about them, but before she could ask what they were actually called, Leo said, "Now here, watch."

Holding the panel up with his left hand, he took the pokey tool in his right, stuck it very carefully in the far corner, and twisted it so it hooked upward. "I find the lock-in button—it's small and buttony—and I press it in until I hear it catch."

Reyna strained to hear it, but she did, an almost inaudible click.

"And now what I usually do is I hold it open with one hand and use the wire stripper to get the tungsten stranded wire."

"The what?"

"It's the silvery-blue wire."

"Oh."

Five minutes and lots of repair-boy jargon later, Leo had fixed up Argentum and supervised as Reyna performed the same maintenance on Aurum. "You did pretty well," he praised her as she wired the dog's control panel back into place and turned off sleep mode. "I should have known you'd be a good student for Doctor Professor Valdez."

_"Doctor professor,"_ she snorted, more to herself than to him. "I'm fairly certain you couldn't pay anyone to give you either of those degrees."

"_You_ learned something, didn't you?" he countered, raising his eyebrows.

She considered this, shrugged, agreed, "I did learn my favorite part of fixing the dogs."

"Which is?"

A smile played on Reyna's lips. "Kissing the mechanic," she admitted, and she ignored the wriggling dogs as she leaned in for another private lesson on this particular subject.


	3. Snacks in the Lamplight

_For Tumblr user perseusuniverse. (All these snippets originated in Tumblr.)_

"Did your electricity go out?"

Reyna looked up in surprise as Leo walked through the front door of her villa, ducking his head and squinting through the darkness. It wasn't like it was _that_ dark, anyway, the little drama king— she had only turned off the overhead lights and was now sitting peacefully in the light of a small lamp. At least, it had been peaceful up until then. She found it difficult to truly relax when her antsy boyfriend was around.

"No, the electricity is fine. Come sit." She patted the seat next to her on the couch. He looked sorely tempted, but:

"Can I— do you want me to turn on the lights?"

"Don't," she said, the warning in her tone light and nonthreatening. It was too late in the evening to deal with any dogs-maimed-another-one paperwork. "It's fine; your eyes will adjust. Just come sit down."

He did, probably because he knew better than to defy her. She looked him over, and then realized he was empty-handed. "Did you bring it?"

Leo grinned, pulling the bag of Haribo gummy bears out of his tool belt. "Appreciate me." He dangled them in front of her, but as soon as she reached for them, he pulled them out of reach.

"I appreciate you," she insisted; "now give me."

"I didn't hear you say any of the magic words," he countered, not handing it over. He liked to live dangerously, she supposed.

"How's 'I'm three inches taller than you' for magic words?"

"Ouch. Well, then, if we're hitting below the belt now …" And then she watched in stunned horror as, in the low lamplight, he _tore the bag open and ate a handful of her gummy bears_.

Reyna opened and closed her mouth, searching for words that left her. He gave her a saucy grin, his cheeks bulging with candy that was rightfully hers. This called for … diversionary tactics.

"Leo," she said, letting her voice go soft and low as she leaned forward. His face flushed a little as she let her eyes trail from his jaw to his mouth to his lovely dark eyes, and he swallowed the mouthful of gummy bears audibly.

"_R_— _reina_?"

She stopped mere inches away, her lips parting in a sigh. Eyes half closed, looking up at him from under her long lashes, she breathed, "_Da__melo_," _give it to me,_ and in a burst of movement she snatched the bag away and plopped back into her original position, a smug smile on her face.

It took Leo a moment to move his hand and realize his prize wasn't there anymore. "That's cheating," he protested. "Really bad cheating."

"Oh, don't be ridiculous, it was spectacular cheating," she said, popping a gummy bear in her mouth. But he was still pouting, so after she swallowed she leaned forward again and gave him a proper kiss, warm on the lips. And she appreciated that the little lamp was the only light to see by, because her face heated up considerably when she smelled his hair smoking and felt his hand in her hair as he kissed her back.


	4. Translation Work

_For Tumblr user Bronnie/missionfabulous, whose idea spawned this. T__akes place a while after Gaea's been defeated and the Greek and Roman camps have become friends._

Leo and Jason sat on top of a picnic table, enjoying the mild weather and lack of save-the-world wars. Demigods both Greek and Roman wandered the grounds of Camp Half-Blood in clusters of two or three, but most of them were hitting up the lake, so for all intents and purposes they were alone there on the lawn. What had started out as Doing Nothing had just become potentially Doing Something: Jason had confessed he wanted to learn a little Spanish.

"Why Spanish?" Not that Leo was complaining; he was just curious why the former praetor and current head counselor of the (granted, one-person) Zeus cabin had suddenly developed an interest in linguistics.

Jason shrugged, a hint of pink creeping onto his face. "I dunno, man, I just thought it might be fun." This might have been convincing, at a stretch, but then his attention slipped and Leo followed his gaze up the hillside to where Piper and Annabeth were lying in the grass, braiding each other's hair and chattering in a blend of English, Greek, and French.

Leo grinned. "I see. The mighty Superman wants to chat up his lady _en una lengua diferente_."

Jason jerked his gaze back to his friend and immediately protested, "No! No, most of you guys know another language—Frank can speak Chinese, Hazel knows Cajun French, Annabeth can speak Ancient Greek and the French Piper's taught her, Percy can speak—well, fish and horse—"

"And Piper can speak French, and the Spanish I've taught her," Leo completed, waggling his eyebrows.

Jason made a slightly strangled noise at the back of his throat that meant he wanted to deny it but couldn't bring himself to lie.

Leo's grin widened. "Not to worry, old chap," he said as he patted his friend's obscenely wide shoulders. "I can help you impress the Piper friend. But wouldn't it be better to learn French? She's fluent and you guys could actually hold a conversation, eventually."

"My French accent made a tree catch fire once," Jason admitted, with such a rueful look at a nearby poplar that Leo made a mental note to ask about that story later.

"Well, she's not as good at Spanish, so you'll be less likely to incite wildfire, at least." Leo stroked his chin, trying to think of the best way to go about this. He hated grammar, so probably some basic phrases would be fine—oh. Oh, yes. He suppressed one of his more impish grins and snapped his suspenders against his shoulders. "Okay, how much do you know?"

"Uh, _hola_ and _adios_ and _gracias_ and _dónde está el ba__ño_."

Hehehe. Perfect. "_Bien_. If you want to ask Piper how she is, you say, _¿Como estás?_"

"_Como estás_," Jason echoed, concentration creasing his brow. "That doesn't mean, like, 'I'm stupid' or something, does it?"

"No," Leo scoffed with a wave of one hand. "It means 'how are you.' I'm personally offended."

"Oh. Okay." Jason looked slightly ashamed but mostly just relieved.

"But only say it like that to people you're close to," the repair boy warned, "or else you'll offend them. Say _como está usted_ to most people."

"Got it. What else?"

"Well," Leo said in a carefully casual tone, "if she asks you how _you_ are, 'I'm doing good today' is _tengo uno pito chiquito_."

"_Tengo un pito chiquito_," he repeated carefully.

"Yep, perfect." He ran through a few more (accurate) phrases before tossing in another mistranslation: "And 'you look nice today' is _tu madre es_—"

"What's going on here?" said a new voice, regal and female and with a touch of Spanish lilt, and Leo froze.

"Oh, hey, Reyna," Jason said with a smile. "Leo's teaching me some Spanish."

Leo turned slowly to see Reyna sweep her braid over her shoulder and plant her hands on her hips, subtly challenging. _La cagaste, la cagaste_, he told himself furiously. She was Puerto Rican, she'd notice and call him out and then he would be fed to her reputedly evil dogs—

"Like what?" she asked.

Jason cleared his throat. _"__¿Como estás?_" he asked, enunciating precisely.

His accent was overly formal, but he hadn't butchered it. Her eyebrows raised infinitesimally. "_Bien._ _¿Y como estás?"_

_"Tengo un pito chiquito,"_ he responded with the same formal exactness, and Reyna's eyebrows jumped sky-high, because she hadn't been expecting to hear her friend declare _I have a small dick_.

"What?"

Jason noticed her reaction and backtracked. "Did I say that wrong?"

Leo, angled slightly out of Jason's line of vision, began to vigorously shake his head _no_. Reyna's dark eyes bored into the son of Hephaestus, the pieces immediately falling into place. Leo waited for her to tear into him, but she was quiet.

"No," she said finally, her voice a little tighter and higher-pitched than before. "I think that's . . . a Mexican variant. You could also say _estoy bien_; it's quicker." She blinked a few times and then rubbed at something in her eye with the heel of her hand. "Sorry—pollen."

"Oh. Okay," the blond said, glancing between the two of them suspiciously, but his trust in Reyna won out over his well-earned suspicion of Leo. He gestured toward Piper and Annabeth: "So I'm okay to maybe go over there and practice?"

"Flawless," Leo commended as Reyna gave a more pragmatic, though still high-pitched, "Yes, you're fine."

Jason slid off the tabletop and trotted out of earshot, and Reyna turned the full force of her gaze onto Leo.

_"'Teaching him some Spanish,'"_ she enunciated, raising one eyebrow._"Really."_

Unable to pretend he wasn't totally proud of having pulled that off, Leo grinned at her. "Come on. If you thought it was so bad, you would have told him what he said."

Reyna blinked again and swallowed, and this time Leo was pretty sure he saw her fighting to keep a straight face. "I hardly think clarifying that_particular_ translation would have been enjoyable for any of us."

"It might make Piper feel better if we did," he considered.

She ignored this innuendo, though her cheeks darkened a little. "Did you give him any _correct_ translations, other than 'how are you'?" she asked.

"Yes!" he protested, puffing his scrawny chest out at the insult to his pride. "'I'm hungry' was right, and 'Clarisse is chasing me,' and—"

"Okay, fine. Were there any other mistranslations I should warn him about?"

Leo pretended to pout. "No. You interrupted us before I could teach him that 'you look nice today' is _tu madre es gorda y fea_." _Your mother is fat and ugly._

In surprise Reyna let out a strange hiccup snort, but she recovered quickly, pressing her knuckles to her lips as she pretended she didn't just _totally laugh_. A grin spread across his face.

"You really can't mislead him like that," she insisted. "And I don't have time to go over everything with him to make sure you don't tell him something like _tu puta madre_ means 'I love you.'"

Ooh. Good idea. She had a trickster side to her, he just knew it. He put that mistranslation away for later. "We could co-teach him Spanish," he offered.

"Right. Because I have time for that."

"Well," he reconsidered with a sideways glance, "if you don't have time for teaching, we could just practice together. I mean, _tu lengua es mi lengua, querida_."

_"No me llama 'querida,'"_ she corrected him with a sigh, for the millionth time. _"—O 'tu.'"_

But there was a pause. And that pause was enough to suggest that ten minutes of intentional misteaching had been enough to bring him one step closer to officially becoming on _tu_ terms with her.


	5. Octavian's Blunder

_Even Octavian has a weakness: seeing physical affection freaks him out. Attached to this. Set about five years after Gaea's defeat. Not meant to be taken seriously omgs_

_Note for non-Spanish speakers: _Te quiero_ and _Te amo_ both mean _I love you_, but the former is more generic and can go for friends/family, whereas the latter is more intense and you only use it for your other half, serious-romantic-love type of use._

Octavian had figured it out. Reyna was the only real obstacle to his ascent to power, and he'd figured out how to remove her—she had all but told him herself. If he had learned anything in Camp Jupiter, it was that everyone had a weakness, a mistake, a skeleton in the closet (literally, in a few cases); and outside Camp Half-Blood, on the way to war with the Greeks, she had handed hers to him. _Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano, _Rachel Elizabeth Dare had called her, hearkening back to when he'd overheard Reyna telling Jason she left that name behind when she left Puerto Rico.

Spanish. The key to finding Reyna's big secret was Spanish. Something had happened in Puerto Rico that she wanted to leave behind, and if he could find out what it was, he'd have her in the palm of his hand, the same way he had the rest of the Romans.

So Octavian collected his highest-quality tools for auguring, and he blocked off his next Saturday afternoon, saving the time for what was certain to be a most useful discovery. His gift of prophecy was a little . . . tenuous, to say the least, but it really did exist, and he was fairly certain he could channel it hard enough to get what he needed. His best teddy bears would lay down their innards for the cause, and possibly some other toys would too. He desperately needed this information. Maybe she'd made a bad deal, or left someone behind, or accidentally killed a family member (that was a popular one)—the possibilities were nearly endless.

Unfortunately, the teddy bears alone proved inadequate, and he had to seek other methods. _Aves augurales_ gave him nothing, nor did any of the typical_auspicia impenetriva_ tactics he used under duress. There was one alternative, one he hadn't tried in ages: consulting The Mirror. If he beseeched Apollo enough, it could search for scenes within a given parameter, like Spanish. He knew Reyna didn't do much Spanish at camp, so the more recent, higher concentrations of the language would be from the latter end of her time in Puerto Rico and Circe's island—the perfect time for her to make whatever mistake she'd tried to bury. Young enough to make a mistake, old enough to make it a big one.

It took some effort to wheel the giant magical object out into the open, but once he had, Octavian swept the linen cover off and let it billow to the ground as he looked at the glass contemplatively. The mirror stood tall, taller than he, with golden engravings of the sun god all around its edges. His reflection stared back at him, and the only sign that the mirror was more than that was the script across the middle: "Burn two (2) Pillow Pets' entrails for next vision." Octavian made quick work of two massive stuffed bumblebees, and as the strange-smelling smoke drifted up through the air, he beseeched Apollo for a vision of Reyna's nearest experience in high concentrations of Spanish, mostly in Latin but with the occasional "please" and "I need this so much" in English, just to be sure the message got across.

He had almost lost hope when he noticed thin grey mist trailing out from the edge of the mirror. It swirled in and around the glass in layers so that the glass was obscured, and though it gave off no sound or smell, he thought it seemed powerful, potentially dangerous, much like a thundercloud withholding its lightning. Or himself. Though, granted, it wasn't quite awe-inspiring enough for that.

The mist hovered as the mirror searched the heat map of Reyna's life for the high concentrations of Spanish from her time in Puerto Rico. Octavian was prepared to wait a while, but the mist thinned much earlier than he had expected. She must have been in Puerto Rico longer than he thought.

Sounds began to filter through the mist, and Octavian heard conversation long before he was able to see anything. He heard a voice he clearly recognized as Reyna's, and a man's, which, though it sounded vaguely familiar, he couldn't quite place. They spoke in quiet English intermingled with Spanish; the augur strained to catch a key word or phrase that might tell him what was going on.

"Are they gone?" Reyna asked.

Her male companion clicked his tongue. "Very. You ever thought about going legitimate?"

"We have a deal," she countered, and Octavian could hear metal clanking in the background. It sounded big. Maybe weapons, or armor. Reyna had been an arms dealer in Puerto Rico? Not bad for a twelve-year-old. "Are you backing out?"

"You say that like it's an option."

The mist was still swirling in the glass, but the two human forms were slowly becoming visible. Strange, Reyna had been tall for a twelve-year-old. And shouldn't her voice have been higher-pitched or something?

Then the mist cleared away, and Octavian's eyes widened: this was not twelve-year-old Reyna in Puerto Rico, this was twenty-year-old Reyna right here in Camp Jupiter; he could see the Little Tiber out in the distance through a window. But if this wasn't Puerto Rico, then what was she . . . ? And then he saw was the tan hands of the young man reaching for her, the bony shoulders, the curly hair, the _tool belt_, and shock welled in him as Leo Valdez took the illustrious praetor by the waist and tugged her toward himself with a grin.

The augur tried to make sense of the scene with his personal knowledge of Reyna—was this a deal gone bad? An arrangement the _graecus_ had overstepped? At least he would meet a quick end.

And then she reached up, tangled her fingers in Valdez's hair, and pressed her lips to his with such fervor that blood rushed to Octavian's face.

The augur averted his eyes and began to look around frantically for an off button to the vision mirror. "I don't want to see this, I don't want to see this!" he shouted at the mirror, his voice cracking as it rose in pitch. The little Apollos along the side seemed to be laughing at him. "Make it go a—No!"

Apollo's mirror was definitely laughing at him, because it conveniently missed that he was going to finish that command with _away_. Instead a little extra mist swirled around Octavian, and an instant later his ghostly vision-self was _in the room_ _with the couple_, dropping onto her discarded armor (that must have been the clanking metal from earlier) and scrambling to disappear. Apollo was losing multiple offerings for this.

Thankfully—or maybe not thankfully—Reyna and Leo didn't seem to have noticed his incorporeal entrance. In the last three seconds, Leo's hair had caught fire, though it didn't seem to be burning Reyna's hands, and she had pulled the elastic band out of her braid and pushed the repair boy backward a few steps until he'd backed against the wall.

_"Mi reina,"_ Leo laughed in mock surprise.

_"Cállate,"_ she ordered, low and breathless, running her hand along his jawline before she kissed him again.

"I don't want to be here," sang Octavian under his breath, looking pointedly at the floor, running his hands through his hair. Maybe if he tried to not be himself he would go back to being in his templum. He dove into the sofa and prayed for release.

Of course, he got no such thing. As the sofa, he just got the honor of being a part of the essence of the room when, in a bout of rebellion, Leo pulled his shirt over his head so it wouldn't catch fire and pushed back on Reyna until she bumped into the Octavian sofa. They called each other muffled names in Spanish—some of them benign insults and some of them endearments—and Octavian wished fondly that he could have heard the Spanish of vision–Puerto Rico.

But Leo broke the kiss-and-insult pattern first: _"Te amo,"_ he blurted into the crook of Reyna's neck, and her breath caught. She pulled away and looked him over; he stared at her with serious dark eyes.

Carefully she asked, _"Me quieres? Estás—?"_

_"Te amo," _he repeated, nervously aggressive.

Reyna considered this development, and coming to a decision she kissed him deliberately on the mouth. _"Te amo tambien,"_ she whispered, meeting his gaze and giving him an embarrassed smile.

His nervous boldness shifted to reveal his relief, his giddiness. "Control freak."

The shift away from intimate declarations relieved her as well. "Camp bomber," she called him before she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him back to her.

"Pleeease stop." Octavian squeezed his eyes shut at the sight of Leo's fingers working Reyna's tank top upward. Apollo hated him for sure, because he could smell the smoke drifting up from every inch of Leo's skin that Reyna touched, could feel the force of her being pressed between the sofa and the_graecus_, could hear their fingers grazing each other's skin, tracing battle scars on shoulders and arms and stomachs. The room was definitely getting warmer.

Then, suddenly, he felt nothing. He opened his eyes to find himself back in the templum, alone and PDA-free. The mist had disappeared back into the mirror, which revealed nothing except a small scripted "Burn two (2) Pillow Pets' entrails for next vision."

Octavian wasn't sure what had just happened. And Apollo's mirror could show the past, present, or future, so he wasn't even sure _when_ it happened. Turning the air conditioning on high to cool down the flush in his face, he began to clean up the templum, wide-eyed. Oh gods. Forget Reyna. She was old enough, she'd probably retire soon anyway. He'd just wait out the praetorship. It was not worth thinking of _that_. Ever again.

Someone knocked on the door from the outside, and he jumped.

"Yes?" he yelped. He turned to see Reyna let herself in, wearing a pristine braid and her full armor. He tried not to picture her like … "Can I help you?" He hoped not. He desperately hoped not.

She looked him over with an evaluating look in her eyes, confused or maybe suspicious. "Leo has been a huge help so far in putting the aerial navy together," she said eventually. "I'm going to have him stay another few weeks so we can get even further along."

Octavian felt all the blood rush to his face.

"Is there a problem with that?" she asked, that confused look coming back. "Can I remind you that the aerial navy was _your_ idea—"

"No, I know," he said, trying not to sound strangled. He had multiple problems with that, but he didn't want to plant ideas if they weren't already there, so he only said, "Make sure the repair boy doesn't get too comfortable here. He does have to go back home eventually."

"Of course." Reyna's eyebrows drew together by a fraction of an inch. She didn't act guilty so much as just put off by his odd behavior. "I'll go . . . let him know." She backed out of the templum slowly, like she didn't trust him not to go nuts if she turned her back.

Octavian watched her go and, once she'd disappeared, shuddered.

_Physical affection._


End file.
